Archive for the 'Banking' Category

The El Dorado for auto-didacts Salman Khan, a portfolio manager in California has created hundreds of free educational videos, available on his web site, the Khan Academy and on YouTube. These videos cover the basics of banking, finance and the current credit crisis — I saw a couple and they’re quite good. Even more importantly, [...]

By V Anantha Nageswaran On September 19th, the U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson issued a statement in which he said that the Federal government “must implement a program to remove these illiquid assets that are weighing down our financial institutions and threatening our economy”. He called it the ‘Troubled Asset Relief Program’. Many have taken to [...]

Chandra Kochar, joint managing director and chief financial officer of India’s largest privately owned bank, $80 billion ICICI Bank, is bullish on India growth story. She contends that the growth in India is shifting from consumerism to manufacturing and infrastructure. In the last five to seven years, India has grown on the basis of its [...]

…likely for the Maharashtra government. The BBC reports that the World Bank is considering the first ever proposal for a loan of $3.5 billion to be disbursed and repaid in rupees and not the US dollar. This is being done to ostensibly counter the fluctuating rupee- dollar rate. However, it needs no saying that a [...]

A friend of IEB who wishes to remain anonymous, The Graduate has sent us a great post on Islamic banking in India. The Graduate is a recently minted MBA who is currently employed with a foreign bank’s business banking operations. He does not consider himself an expert on banking, he hopes to bring lay readers [...]

And in the process, discover your Inner Economist Tyler Cowen wants to give merit-based gifts to Indians. Yes, this involves economics professors and free-market fundamentals. He has made an announcement on his blog, and it may be worth your time to check it out. With your email, send a one sentence proposal of how the [...]

Once again, the petroleum minister Murli Deora has requested the finance minister to issue oil bonds. In what is becoming common practice now, the money thus raised is going to be used to “compensate the firms for selling below cost”. For starters, this move is simply bad financial practice, for it violates one of the [...]

BBC News is reporting the World Bank has approved a USD 600 million loan to India, aimed at “helping millions of poor farmers across India” (original report at Reuters). The money will go to supplement a government sponsored program, worth USD 3.32 billion, to refinance India’s cooperative banks, which would then offer cheaper loans to farmers. [...]

How much of Dr Manmohan Singh’s talk on reforming agriculture will get translated into action? Inaugurating the Second Agriculture Summit 2006 organised jointly by the Ministry of Agriculture and FICCI, the Prime Minister declared that the endeavour of his government would be to bridge each of the four deficit viz. the public investment and credit [...]

Prashant wrote to me earlier this week to bring a recent blog post (and Business Standard article) from Ajay Shah to my attention. Essentially Ajay is arguing the following: “a lot of what is going on is owing to procyclical (i.e. destabilising) macro policy. I emphasise the distinction between the long-term trend and the business [...]

Resolving the ‘agrarian crisis’ requires understanding the laws of economics P Sainath’s years of experience covering India’s countryside lends a credibility to his voice. How unfortunate it is then that he should expend it on framing the issue in partisan, rich vs poor, urban vs rural terms. Here’s an excerpt from a recent interview he [...]

The Times of India reports: In a remote village in Tamil Nadu, little Nirmala (12), rolls her nimble fingers over a sheaf of tobacco leaves, pins them adroitly into a tumti yale and seals the edges. She has to do this about 2,000 times a day, like she has been doing for over two years [...]

More of the same where the same has failed Here’s a conundrum: it is amply clear that given the abysmal state of India’s roads, railways, ports, irrigation and electricity grids, and given the rapid growth of the Indian economy over the past several years, good infrastructure is in great demand in India. Yet the central [...]

A visual treat for you, dear reader. The India – China comparison in pictures, courtesy Deutsche Bank Hat tip: The World Bank Blog, which in turn got it from New Economist… Sidebar: I sometimes wonder if this China-India comparison is a tad overdone. However, given that we’re talking about 2.3 billion people, or more than [...]